Displayed above is a set of blinking gifs that I created using DS9 imaging
software. Our variable
sources were obtained by the two overlapped areas as depicted in Fig 1 on
the introduction page. The GLIMPSE team
developed a program that would find variable stars in the Milky Way Galaxy by comparing matched sources and identifying variations in the apparent magnitudes. The gifs
were created to test that the program for the 10-sigma cuts were
variable sources or not. The 10-sigma cut contain a total of 1060 variable stars. By hand, I created one acrmin blinking gifs for 50 of our variable sources.

After creating the blinking gifs, we wanted to know more about the
distribution of variables. Here, displayed in Fig 2 for column 1, is a
histogram of the apparent magnitudes for the variable stars. The first plot is
displayed for band 1 (3.6 micron wavelength) epoch 1 which corresponds to
GLIMPSE survey and epoch 2 for DEEP GLIMPSE in
blue. There is a peak at
around 7.5 and another at 11.5 magnitudes. In the second column is the difference in magnitude for the variable stars between the
two epochs. Our variability ranges from 0.5 to around 5.5 apparent magnitudes. Two important aspects from the pair plots are our variability range and the bimodal
distribution of the variables in the first two bands. Bands 3 and 4 do not
display a bimodal distribution due to the lack of data from a detector
malfunction in the DEEP GLIMPSE project. After learning about our
distributions we sought to uncover the galactic location of variable stars.

Fig 3: Galactic map with location of faint and bright variables

In hopes of determining the galactic location, we split the bimodal distribution into two arrays of data.
Anything from 0 to 9.5 magnitudes was catalogued as a bright variable star and 9.5 to
20 magnitudes was identified as a faint variable star.
Fig 3 is a galactic map with the longitude on the x-axis and
latitude on the y-axis. Faint variables plotted in
white and the bright variables displayed in red. From this
plot, we noticed that the majority of the bright variable stars are concentrated closer to the
galactic center of the galaxy with the fainter stars distributed in
both regions.

Fig 4: Histogram of color separation

Next we went further into describing our distribution by plotting a histogram for the color separation at
3.6-8.0 microns. What we noticed was that, on average, brighter variables
plotted above in Fig 4 were
redder than the fainter variables in black. Information that we gathered
from this plot has lead us to believe the reason for bright variables being
redder is from the dust that bright stars emit, thus we are able to detect in the infrared.

The next step was to classify the environment of our 1060 10-sigma
variables.
An environment could either be an IRDC (Infrared Dark Cloud),
nearSFR (near Star Forming Region), SFR( Star Forming Region), or Field Star.
An infrared dark cloud is a dense region of a giant molecular cloud that is
cold. These regions repesent highly active star forming regions in the Milky
Way. In the images above there is a set of variables in the first row and the environment they reside in directly below each of them.
We were able to detect IRDC by observing and noticing if we had a green
cluster of stars like in Fig 5. The green cluster comes from the dust
that the stars in the region emit, allowing the stars light to interact
with the dust and displaying it as green with our infrared detection. Next
in Fig 6 we have a SFR. The glow is from chemical compounds called
Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). These compounds are excited by
ultraviolet radiation given off by massive stars causing the PAHs to glow in
the 8.0 micron band. This glow tells us that there was recent star
formation. Any star that was not in a SFR but in the 2 acrmin frame of a SFR
was classifed as a near star forming region which is shown in Fig 7. Lastly if, SFR, nearSFR, or IRDC
were not present then the environment was a Field Star as shown in Fig 8. This information will be used for
development of a web page for our 10-sigma variables.